1. Field
The present disclosure relates to transmission of notifications, and more particularly, to methods and systems for the structuring of rights to transmission of notifications based on roles.
2. Background
Businesses and governmental entities, including municipalities and schools, are ever more reliant on communicating through the mass transmission of notifications to their staff, citizens and family members of students to keep these constituencies apprized of important events, and sometimes of emergencies. For example, a school principal might need to distribute a message to the parent of every child that the school will be closed the next day due to some unforeseen event such as flooding, fire, or freezing conditions. As another example, an official from a fire department, police department, or city departments might need to distribute a message to every resident that a street will be closed due to an emergency. As a further example, a military officer might need to distribute a message to his junior officers that training is canceled due to a conflict in scheduling. Notifications with such messages might be sent by telephones, facsimiles, pagers, electronic mail (e-mail), and/or text messages. These notifications will typically vary in their degree of importance, in the number of recipients, or in the immediacy with which they must be sent.
However, there currently exists a growing problem as mass notification transmission systems become more prevalent. In particular, it is difficult to monitor access to the transmission of notifications to potential recipients since the number of potential recipients and the number of users/initiators that transmit the notifications are constantly increasing. For example, in the context of a school system, if a teacher intends to distribute a notification to a large number of recipients, such as all parents and/or guardians of students at a school, it is important to ensure that the teacher has the appropriate authority to distribute the notification to such a large number of recipients, and that the notification is appropriate for the intended recipients. A principal of the same school, however, may not require need for such authorization. As another example, if the same teacher intends to distribute a notification to a smaller number of recipients, such as only the parents and/or guardians of students in the teacher's class, the teacher may be provided a different level of authorization to distribute the notification.
In such situations, it is important that users have the appropriate authorization rights or access privileges to distribute different types of notifications based on those users' roles in the notification system. It would thus be desirable to assign access privileges to transmit notifications to intended recipients in a uniform and efficient manner.